Critique of Barkley (Part 1)

Here’s José’s (And now Redstar’s) critique of ADHD, HUNTING, AND EVOLUTION: “JUST SO” STORIES by Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. & Russell A. Barkley, Ph.D..

Used specifically without permission and expressly to discredit only those parts of the authors’ arguments that I felt worthy of my response.

Ditto... Why get permission to show some would-be-know-it-all credential the flaws in their logic, and just how stupid they really are?


“However, there is an increasing trend among pop evolutionists to embrace the ... view [which] suggests that all human qualities including anatomical features, behaviors, quirks and idiosyncrasies arose and developed through a process of selection because they served a functional purpose.”

Let I first point out that human evolution is not quite governed by the popular conception of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. Man is a very physically frail creature, and was at the mercy of his surroundings until he was able to put to use his greatest asset - his intelligence. The human brain affected evolution as no natural process could have. Therefore, features which may seem to have no functional purpose to us from our modern prospective could have been “selected”, but not as Darwin envisioned.

Agreed, human kind has changed very little physiologically speaking since the days of its early ancestors. Being the typically frail life forms humans are considering their “animal” kindred’s. Evolution strictly in a physical sense would have removed the human species ruthlessly and permanently from the gene pool in our current and past physiological forms.

The DSM-IV and the current general climate of professional opinion state or imply strongly that children who seem too active or insufficiently attentive in school have something wrong with their brains. Since schools are a traditional and powerful instrument of education and socialization, only abnormal individuals would not fit easily into their requirements for performance, or so the argument goes.

Would it not be more fair to acknowledge that our bodies and minds, which presumably evolved over many millennia of hunting and gathering on the savannas of Africa, may not yet have evolved beyond the requirements of the Stone Age and become adapted to the highly artificial environment of the modern school? Short attention spans and high activity were highly adaptive and served our ancestors well, promoting survivability in a world full of predators. Our modern schools are, after all, an innovation of at most the last 400 years and for the general population only about 100 years.

The action-oriented individual would likely have been advantaged under the brutal or harsh circumstances of the frozen steppe or humid jungle, whereas the excessively contemplative more pragmatic individual would have been environmentally challenged.... As our modern society has become increasingly industrialized and organized, action-oriented characteristics have become less socially adaptive...


“Thus, it is not surprising that there is an increasingly popular, and to some extent, seductive trend among the lay public to view symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - principally qualities of inefficient self-regulation and executive function (Barkley, 1997), as adaptive behaviors.”

The average person (think beer and football) doesn’t have the intellectual capacity or - ironically enough - the attention span to understand anything as subtle as Hartmann’s “Hunter” concept. So when Barkley refers to the “lay public”, he must mean people like myself - extremely intelligent, as validated by “Farmer” credentials - yet not possessing degrees in psychology/psychiatry, and therefore not capable of forming a valid opinion in his area of so-called expertise.

Then Barkley points out that the most relevant quality of ADHD is inefficient self-regulation, that is, an inability to “put on the brakes”. Yet I know examples of many people fitting the description of ADD (though most are probably not diagnosed because they’ve learned to cope with their condition) who often have no problem with self-regulation and executive function - namely the VG.


“This argument posits that over the two million years or so our ancestors evolved”

Let’s tackle each of the following in turn:


“impulsivity”

A word I truly despise - what exactly is impulsivity? I am a Hunter, and yet I have never been incarcerated, I have exactly one moving violation in my life (doing 73 mph in a 65 zone, received a $22 ticket), and exactly zero traffic accidents.

I do not spend recklessly, and I am very responsible, almost (gulp) conservative. I’d say I am rather cautious for one so impulsive. So it seems I have a “selective” impulsivity - is this not an oxymoron?


“inconsistent sustained attention and effort”

Rusty, have you ever been bored? I mean really, really bored. So I can’t give consistent attention to very boring things - I must be so dysfunctional. I can give amazing attention to a wide variety of non-boring activities, such as appreciating extremely complex theorems in Abstract Algebra or meticulously refuting the arguments of pompous, self-righteous, so-called scientists.


“hyperactivity”

I don’t know how anyone could think this was not adaptive in any lifestyle not as completely sedentary like our current Farmer lifestyle.


“emotional dyscontrol”

Just the other day I was examining the DSM-IV, and came to the conclusion that I suffer from the following conditions: ADHD/ADD (Combined Type), Oppositional Defiance Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Bipolar 1 Disorder, Mood Disorder, Pre-Menstrual Syndrome, and Alcoholism (even though the average teenager consumes more alcohol in a year than I have in my entire lifetime). How do I manage to get out of bed each morning?


“... somehow served an adaptive purpose. Although this romantic view is embraced by many and may well pass the Readers Digest criteria for publication, is it truly accurate?”

Nice tactic, Rusty - employ the “Reader’s Digest” insult to make your opponents seem less intelligent, scientific, and believable.

Modern social adaptations are not based in natural environmental adaptations, natural selection, and species evolution. Simply put, the perceived “Opinions” of what constitutes inattention, or hyperactivity in the artificial environments of a modern society, are now viewed as “Dysfunctions,” “Disabilities,” and “Disorders.”

This by no means dictates natural, evolutionary, and adaptive forces that have been encoded in our genome for hundreds of thousands of years. Adaptive evolution runs on environmental “Facts,” not on societal “Opinions.” The assumptions of brain dysfunction in inattentive, active, action-oriented individuals in our schools and in our societies. Suffers from too narrow an evolutionary and anthropological perspective of what is normal in human brain function.


“Does it fit with what is known about human evolution, particularly what is known in the emerging field of evolutionary psychology?”

I don’t know, does it? And isn’t the word “known” much too strong for evolutionary psychology? Psychology is already among the “softest” of all sciences. Additionally, any science faces major obstacles when attempting to recreate the past - for example, we have no idea what skin color dinosaurs had, or how long an individual dinosaur lived. (10 years? 50 years? 1000 years?) Since we’re on this subject anyway, let’s delve further into just how little everyone seems to understand evolution.

It is now considered conventional wisdom that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the impact of an asteroid (or comet) at the end of the Cretaceous Period (65 million years ago). However, in spite of strong evidence that the impact actually occurred, there is much room for debate as to whether or not this event caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, or was merely the last straw in a chain of events. For example, how did snakes, lizards, and especially the environmentally sensitive frogs survive this extinction? Another line of reasoning is that dinosaur extinction was caused by mass-migratory behaviors which led to the intermingling of diseases (to which certain populations have no immunity). Dinosaurs were the first large migratory land animal to appear on the planet.

So I ask, is it known that a comet/asteroid impact directly caused dinosaurs to become extinct?

Evolutionary Psychology? What kind of asinine piece of bull pucky is that? To assume one knows what constituted “Normal Behavior” long before psychology, psychiatry, and the extremely flawed concept of “The Norm” were invented? All without even taking into consideration the “Tribal/Clan Societies” customs and curiosities that were very normal and perfectly natural to them. Let’s try some good old fashion “Tangible” neuronal and physical evolutionary biology here:

First off, Evolutionary Biology has a far more solid foundation.

Evolutionary biology organizes data from behavioral and cognitive sciences, paralleling similar efforts in other areas of medicine and biology. The core facts hold natural selection has shaped the temperament types available to our species. These temperaments and their innate traits enhance adaptation and survival. Thus, many emotional and behavioral responses are not “symptoms” of disorders. They reflect adaptive responses of the organism to environmental demands.

As we clearly see from this vantage point, the human brain is an adaptational biological system, evolved to fit our species with a range of environments. Human and non-human primate research in natural habitats have proven that a wide degree of tolerance for varied ecological conditions enables species’ survivability.

To explain the structure of a highly evolved, biological system as the brain, it must be understood what adaptation problems it had to overcome. What information would have been available in such primitive conditions and the environments for resolving these problems of survival, insuring the continued proliferation of the human species.

A. Evolutionary Models to AD/HD
1. In relation to evolutionary theories of psychology and biology, the premises must be explored evolutionary perspectives explain the presence of AD/HD traits. Given the current estimated frequency of AD/HD being prevalent in 3% to 5% of the total population, it is unlikely that such a “disorder” could be as pervasive in the human species if it were not maintained within the species by selection forces. Forces that conveyed certain survivability advantages of AD/HD characteristics and their associated traits.

2. AD/HD is characterized as a classic trio of symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. What most modern research has failed to observe is that each of these perceived “symptoms” are adaptive traits in most occurrences. Researchers just as often overlook the importance of creativity in primitive humans, and that same trait’s correlation in those who possess the AD/HD traits. What these adaptive traits are, and the survival problems they solved are:

a. Increased Motor Activity (Hyperactivity).
For an organism to adapt successfully, it must constantly explore the environment for threats and opportunities. Increased motor behavior and hyperactivity is useful to assist in effective foraging, spotting of new opportunities, anticipating dangers, etc. Furthermore, increased motor behaviors serve to create more permanent and stronger neural connections within the brain, in ways that better fit the environment one must survive in. Perceived hyper behaviors stimulate the development of muscle, motor skills, and dexterity. Animals that have adapted to food-scarce environments show these same high degrees of motor behavior. Adaptational motor behaviors are expressed when it serves adaptation and survival, and is suppressed when it does not. When given sufficient time for evolutionary and selection forces to encode the behavior within the species’ genome.

b. Attention Processes (Scanning and Rapidly Shifting Attention).
Vigilance is necessary to monitor dangers and threats. Over focused attention is quite impractical in high-threat environments. Animals that are preyed upon, or are in environments with a high ratio of predators to prey will have the increased scanning behaviors. Animals raised in higher-threat and/or high stimuli environments show high scanning levels, even when this is no longer necessary to further development. Adaptive reasons for the behavior exist within those species’ genome. Environment shapes the tendencies of a species to express responses such as increased scanning behaviors, or inattention to a single, repetitive stimuli.

c. Impulsivity.
Impulsivity as an organism’s quick response to environmental cues. These responses are relatively automatic and reflexive. Though an organism can learn to adjust the threshold and timing of the responses based on the likelihood of survivability and opportunity as a result of the immediate, delayed, and whether the response is a correct one.

The species without the ability to adjust timing-dependent, opportunity dependent, response thresholds are less likely to adapt to different environments. The result being an organism will more than likely be unable to pass its genes on to the next generation. The organism that does not quickly pounce on a potential prey or dodge a potential predator will statistically not get another chance to do so. The relative danger, either perceived or real, can easily be outweighed by the disastrous results of missing a critical cue in dangerous, and resource scarce environments. In such environments an organism will evolve and adapt to responding on a relatively low threshold of stimuli.

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